Elitism: the advocacy or existence of an elite as a dominating element in a system or society.

First, the question is framed negatively, which makes you approach it negatively. Like my wife asking our grandson: whose pie do you dislike better? Mine or you mother’s? Really? Is there an upside to answering that? Even framed positively: Whose pie do you like better? Is a lose-lose. Because the answer, of course, is I LOVE BOTH!

I also check author bios. In this discourse between two authors—well, okay sort of authors, — one listed that he was a columnist for the Tablet, published two collections of poetry and had won a prize for criticism in 2010.

The other has a longer bio—NY Based critic, translator and moderator. She talks about operas and Bugs Bunny so I guess she was taking the populist POV?

The guy said an “’elite’ writer tends to be ahead of is time, a scout for posterity.” He ends by saying to understand this one author you have to “think and see like Bolano. This takes a kind of talent—a talent for reading, which is more common than the talent for writing, but still in the possession of a minority.” I guess that would be the elitist POV. I get it even if you don’t. Because I have a special talent. As a person who has made his living writing for over a quarter of a century and penned over 70 books, it never occurs to me that my readers need to think like me to understand me; that feels a bit narcissistic. I have to engage and entertain the reader.

I had to re-read the article twice, being from da Bronx, to even figure out who was taking which side of the discussion. Because they both sounded pretty snooty. That’s a populist term.

At the Maui Writers Conference, where I taught for seven straight years, we (a group of genre, bestselling authors) used to judge an award sponsored by a literary agent. The award was for the “best” submission. The question we asked every year to the person sponsoring the award was: Do you want us to pick the best writing or the most sellable one? Because the two were not the same. We also used to joke they gave literary writers prizes and popular ones, aka genre writers, checks.

First, I hate to group people under labels. But it seems as if the NY Times, which I peruse every day (my wife reads every word, every day) tends to take an elitist POV in its book review. Hell, their bestseller list just dropped the mass market paperback bestseller list; talk about an elitist decision, since over half of it is constantly dominated by romance novelists. A genre which sells 56% of all fiction, which means it’s popular. So the Times made a very conscious decision to discard and ignore the popular!

Second, what does “harmful to the arts” mean? Whose art? What is art?

What’s harmful to the arts is trying to pigeon hole art. One of the most thought provoking new TV series in the past year was Westworld. A reboot of a Michael Crichton story. It explores what is consciousness. When they actually used the term “bicameral mind” my wife and I looked at each other because we bonded over Julian Jaynes and his epic The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. My copy was destroyed when I rolled my Jeep in the Okefenokee Swamp which pretty sums up how I look at elitist vs populist.

What I think we need to do is frame the question positively. How can we get people who were raised differently, who have a different life experience, who often literally have different brains, to understand each other? I told me wife the other day that at my high school in the Bronx, Cardinal Spellman, from which a current Supreme Court justice graduated, we drew students from all over the city. There were kids from really rough and poor neighborhoods. And one thing I discovered was they really didn’t understand where they came from was “rough and poor”. It was the norm. Same for a farm girl from Nebraska. That’s their norm.

The real question is: How does art reach both of them?

I submit the answer is by touching not just the brain, but by touching the brain and the heart.

Share this:

Like this:

For the United State to formally go to war requires a joint resolution of both Congresses and then executed by the President.

The last time this happened 5 June 1942, when the United States declared war on Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania.

In total, we’ve declared war only 11 times. The first was on 17 June 1812 when we declared was against Great Britain.

Since then we’ve declared war:

On Mexico. 12 May 1846

On Spain. 25 April 1898

On Germany. 6 April 1917

On Austria-Hungary. 7 Dec 1917

On Japan. 8 Dec 1941

On Germany. 11 Dec 1941

On Italy. 11 Dec 1941

On Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. 4 June 1942

And that, folks is it. Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Iraq, all of it: not technically wars.

Article One, Section Eight, of the Constitution declares that “Congress shall have the power to declare War”. However, it’s not designated exactly how Congress does that. In fact, it’s kind of buried in there. Clause 8 is “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their Respective Writings and Discoveries.” Which means my copyright comes before Clause 11: “To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.” What letters of Marque and Reprisal mean is we can hire pirates to attack our enemies. So. Yeah. Kind of out of date. But it’s still there.

Technically, this has been adjusted over the years to allow Congress to “authorize” us going to war, rather than declaring it.

The current situation is somewhat confusing. Technically, the war in Iraq ended on 28 Dec 2014. Except we still have troops in the region. Some dying.

The war in Afghanistan ended even earlier on 15 December 2011. Really? Someone didn’t send out the notice.

The “War on Terror” doesn’t exist. Legally.

We are currently conducting military actions in six countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and let’s add Syria to that list. The authorization from Congress for us to be doing that is hazy at best. The definitions of our actions there is largely undefined. We have SOF, Special Operations Forces, in 134 countries, give or take, which can range (from personal experience where I was the highest ranking military commander on the ground in a foreign country) from a single A-Team to a heck of a lot more. What those troops are doing is teaching other people to fight a war on the side we desire. There are also SOF missions such as Direct Action and Strategic Recon.

The biggest problem we have is there is no specific end game. As someone who has spent a large percentage of his life engaged in preparing for and executing “war”, one of the first things I was taught is that there must be a specific strategic objective in a military campaign. “Stopping terror” is not an objective.

As contained in an unclassified CIA document, the definition of victory in the War on Terror is:

Victory against terrorism will not occur as a single, defining moment. It will not be marked by the likes of the surrender ceremony on the deck of the USS Missouri that ended World War II. However, through the sustained effort to compress the scope and capability of terrorist organizations, isolate them regionally, and destroy them within state borders, the United States and its friends and allies will secure a world in which our children can live free from fear and where the threat of terrorist attacks does not define our daily lives.

Victory, therefore, will be secured only as long as the United States and the international community maintain their vigilance and work tirelessly to prevent terrorists from inflicting horrors like those of September 11, 2001.

Unfortunately that vague goal can’t be won by force of arms. A thing called history informs us of that. If, in our hubris, we believe we can do something that has never been done before, that is why it’s called hubris.